Kitabı oxu: «Left of the Bang»
CLAIRE LOWDON
Left of the Bang
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thestate.co.uk
This eBook first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015
Copyright © Claire Lowdon 2015
Cover photographs © Christoph Hetzmannseder / Getty Images (woman); Phil Portus Photography (train). Design © Kate Gaughran.
Song lyrics quoted from: ‘Hey Jude’ by John Lennon and Paul McCartney (Sony/ATV); ‘The Nearness of You’, music by Hoagy Carmichael, lyrics by Ned Washington (Sony/ATV); ‘Only Girl (In The World)’, by Crystal Johnson, Mikkel S. Eriksen, Tor Erik Hermansen, Sandy Wilhelm (Sony/ATV); ‘S&M’, by Ester Dean, Mikkel S. Eriksen, Tor Erik Hermansen, Sandy Wilhelm (Sony/ATV); ‘We Are the Champions’, by Freddie Mercury (Sony/ATV); ‘You’re Not the Only Oyster in the Stew’, music by Harold Spina, lyrics by Johnny Burke (Warner/Chappell Music)
Claire Lowdon asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008102166
Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780008102180
Version: 2016-03-15
Praise for Left of the Bang
‘Clear-eyed, audacious and disarmingly honest’ William Boyd
‘A disarming and affecting debut … Lowdon has an acute ability to paint exquisite pictures of ordinary life and capture what is extraordinary about it. It is social observation at its very best with characters that are both painfully honest but also hilarious in their satirical humour … Tamsin Jarvis will resonate long after the final page is turned’ Stylist, *****
‘In refreshingly flourish-free prose, Lowdon picks apart the cloaks that these millennial Londoners use to disguise their true selves, uncovering the startling disconnects underlying their friendships. The characters of this remarkable debut are neatly drawn and sharply skewered, the satirical observations crack like a whip and, most impressive of all, even the denouement arrives with the bang of the title’ Sunday Times
‘While [Lowdon’s] cast are hardly sympathetic, they’re too credible – and also too damaged – to be mere one-dimensional grotesques. The upshot is that they get uncomfortably under your skin, making Lowdon’s incendiary denouement real read-between-your-fingers stuff’ Daily Mail
‘In her deeply impressive and accomplished first novel, Left of the Bang, Claire Lowdon charts the lives of a group of twentysomethings in London with sharpness and precision, with humour and insight, and with generous helpings of humanity … There are shades of Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children and hints of Lena Dunham’s Girls, too, in the book’s depictions of sex and in how it so flawlessly captures these twentysomethings’ expectations of what the world owes them, and the disappointments that flow from these misapprehensions … The writing is razor-sharp, excruciating in its honesty … It takes stylistic risks with voice, tense and point of view. These pay off, absolutely, and tempted this reader, upon finishing, to begin again from page one … A piece of fiction that is flawless, beautifully paced and expertly judged. At age 30, Lowdon has the flair, polish and insight of a firmly established novelist … A gifted and perceptive writer’ Sarah Bannan, Irish Times
‘Write what you know, they say. Yet it’s a clever author who does just that and succeeds in offering insight. Claire Lowdon spins this tale about twentysomethings living in London as only someone who knows the drill well could do: it’s full of references to real pubs, nights out and the very particular emotional angst that comes from that post-university period in a thrilling but indifferent metropolis … The characters are well-drawn and sympathetic … Lowdon flits deftly between the perspective of each character … She takes time with the hopes and fears of each one, conjuring up a tension that builds painfully slowly … Lowdon uses sex to show the characters’ real selves, their hidden wants and desires … A smart and sober pronouncement on consequence’ Francesca Steele, The Times
‘Claire Lowdon’s serious-minded but nevertheless sparky debut novel can be seen as an extended rebuttal of the secret but abiding anxiety – especially among the youth – that everybody is having more, or better, sex than they are. What if, she asks, nobody is?… Lowdon is unobtrusively good on the non-glamour of London life … Left of the Bang is not a didactic novel, but its story certainly mutates from social comedy into something far more disturbing’ Alex Clark, Spectator
‘Claire Lowdon has written the definitive novel of a generation of Londoners. So involved did I become in their lives, so closely did I feel I knew them, that the note of disquiet that carries through the pages like the eerie mewl of a tuning fork absolutely levelled me when finally it reached its full glass-shattering resonance three-quarters of the way through’ Gavin Corbett
‘Attuned to the nuances of social interaction that lie above the threshold of awareness and elude articulation, Lowdon observes interpersonal relationships with a satirist’s sharp eye. Her narrator pierces façades and parses hybrid, often contradictory, cocktails of emotion with an efficiency reminiscent of Alan Hollinghurst’s early novels … Peeling the layers of her characters’ drives and desires demands a precision that, as the subtlety of these observations attests, Lowdon possesses’ Lindsay Gail Gibson, Times Literary Supplement
‘A startlingly assured debut, chronicling the lives of twentysomethings in contemporary London. (I read it in the same fevered excitement as I read Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children.) It’s a social commentary, a page-turner and it’s packed with beautiful sentences’ Sunday Business Post
‘All the way through what is essentially a realist novel about young Londoners runs an edge of tension, of suppressed panic. You await the explosion, never quite knowing what form it will take … Minor events all seem to take place in the shadow of the loaded gun we know must be about to go off, in “those vacuum-packed, suspended seconds” before the obscure but inevitable bang … The characters’ moral wranglings and the machinery of the plot spiral inexorably inwards, into the bedroom. It’s there that everything will eventually go bang’ Lidija Haas, Guardian
‘Lowdon has Evelyn Waugh’s willingness to inflict gruesome plot twists on her Bright Young Things’ Literary Review
‘A fresh and sharp-minded writer’ Blake Morrison, Observer
‘Razor-sharp satire of millennial Londoners and their pretentions in this promising debut’ Sunday Times
‘Lowdon deftly maps the tangled love life of failed concert pianist Tamsin Jarvis … She writes with an admirable honesty’ Claire Allfree, Metro
‘Deftly plotted and evocatively written. Left of the Bang’s characters are believable and their interactions ironically, wince-inducingly familiar’ Sasha Garwood, Marylebone Journal
Dedication
For my grandmothers, D.E.M. and G.M.M.L.
Epigraph
Left of the bang: a military term for the build-up to an explosion. On a left–right time line, preparation and prevention are left of the bang; right of the bang refers to the aftermath.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for Left of the Bang
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Thank You
About the Author
About the Publisher
One
Her father’s arms around her. His voice vibrating through his chest and into hers.
‘I’m here, tinker. I’m here.’
Her bleeding toenail, open like a birthday card.
Two
When Tamsin Jarvis was twelve, she saw her father kissing another woman.
The whole family was up in Manchester to hear him conduct a celebration of British music at the Bridgewater Hall. It was a treat, at the end of the concert, for Tamsin to go to his dressing room all by herself. Her mother had to put ten-year-old Serena to bed in the Jurys Inn Hotel across the road. ‘Tell Daddy not to hang around chatting, the restaurant’s booked for nine forty-five.’
Backstage, everything was hushed. All the doors had leather quilting. The carpet was very thick. A stagehand with his radio earpiece hooked round his neck pointed her towards the end of the corridor. Tamsin pushed her father’s door open, enjoying its weight and the smooth, silent swing of the hinges.
Three seconds later she closed it again, just as silently. The lovers had been kissing with their eyes shut. Neither of them knew they’d been seen.
The woman was Valery Fischer, the mezzo from the concert. Val and her husband Patrick were old friends of the Jarvises. Their only son, a stocky, sporty eleven-year-old called Alex, played viola in the same youth orchestra as Serena. Last summer, the two families had even spent a long weekend together in a rented cottage in Suffolk.
Tamsin walked slowly back up the corridor, seeing it all over again. Bertrand’s left hand gripping Val’s bottom through the stiff satin of her turquoise strapless dress. His right hand crushing her loosely permed curls. A large raised mole in the middle of Val’s back, pale, like a Rice Krispie. The kiss itself: muscular, forceful, almost angry, as if they were fighting one another with their mouths.
In the foyer, she sat down on the floor next to the ice-cream stand and tried to think. When she closed her eyes, she could hear the sound of her own blood. She could feel it, too, each pulse a tight squirting sensation. Around her, adult chatter thinned to a trickle as the concert-goers left the building. Tamsin stayed where she was, eyes still closed. A Hoover began its melancholy drone.
‘Tamsin?’
It was her father. He was still wearing his black trousers, but he’d swapped his tux and dress shirt for a loose grey tunic. He held out one of his big hands for Tamsin to haul herself up with.
‘What are you doing down there?’
‘We have to go,’ said Tamsin. ‘We’ll be late for supper.’
* * *
For five years she told no one.
Tamsin was frightened: of the pain that disclosure would cause her mother, of the possibility of divorce (a condition that ranked, in her twelve-year-old mind, as second only to cancer). Most of all she was frightened of her father’s anger – which, she realised, would no longer be the familiar, beneficent anger of grown-up to child, father to daughter, but real, unbounded, adult anger.
She hated being alone with him. Car journeys were the worst: prisoner in the passenger seat on the way home from school, her father asking about her day, trying to make her laugh. He was his usual garrulous, ebullient self, fond of hyperbole, susceptible to sentiment, domineering, opinionated, funny, warm. Tamsin could see nothing in his demeanour to suggest that here was a man with a terrible secret. And this was what made him truly monstrous.
Bertrand wasn’t as relaxed as he appeared. He was worried – by Tamsin, about Tamsin. Before, the two of them had been a team. Now she was nervy and skittish, slow in conversation, unwilling to meet his eye. If he hugged her, she hugged back, but she no longer initiated contact between them. On more than one occasion, he had the impression that his touch was actually unpleasant to her.
Before – but before what? Bertrand didn’t know; he couldn’t even really say when the change had occurred. He wondered if some male authority figure had behaved inappropriately towards her – a teacher, or perhaps one of the gap-year students who helped out at her summer music school. When he suggested this to his wife, however, she dismissed it as a typical piece of melodrama. ‘She’s growing up, that’s all. She can’t be your little girl for ever.’ They were in the bedroom, getting ready to go out for the evening. Roz spritzed perfume onto her left wrist, then drew her right wrist across her left in a sawing motion. ‘She’ll be thirteen soon. It’s just hormones,’ she said decisively, meeting her husband’s doubtful frown with a brisk, case-closed sort of look.
Bertrand also wondered whether Tamsin knew about his affair. Somehow, it seemed to him that she might. No matter how firmly he told himself that his anxiety was unfounded, he felt increasingly uneasy in his daughter’s presence; and in time, he found he was unable to prevent unease from translating into mild aversion. He was ashamed of this feeling, and did everything he could to conceal it – to the point where he appeared, if anything, even more affectionate and indulgent towards Tamsin than before.
As far as her mother was concerned, Tamsin was a textbook teenager: surly and non-responsive at home, perpetually in trouble at school. She collected detentions, missed curfews, got a tattoo. At fourteen she spent a night in A&E with a stomach full of vodka and caffeine tablets. At fifteen she pierced her own bellybutton. ‘Hormones’ became Roz’s buzzword, mouthed unsubtly over Tamsin’s head to sympathetic friends. Secretly, she was a little frightened of her eldest daughter. Tamsin at sixteen was a good six inches taller than her mother and almost ethereally thin, with angular shoulders and no hips or breasts to speak of. Cropped halterneck tops exposed the bejewelled bellybutton, elongated by the tautness of her stomach and embellished, more often than not, with a purplish crust of infection.
On the rare occasions that her parents argued, Tamsin lay awake in bed, monitoring the muffled sounds coming up from the kitchen for any change in register that might signal the end. The end: expected and dreaded yet also, in a small, hard way, longed for. But the rapid cadences of blame and recrimination always rallentandoed into a truce, followed, a few minutes later, by her mother’s face at the bedroom door, flushed with guilt and tenderness.
‘Darling. All couples argue. There’s nothing to worry about, I promise. Your father and I love each other. And we love you. Love you love you love you.’
Roz perched her small frame on the edge of the bed. Her daughter’s large-lidded eyes – Bertrand’s eyes – were round and wide, a precious glimpse of the little girl who had long since morphed into this difficult, untouchable half-woman.
And so the silence continued, as if it might go on for ever. But later, when Tamsin looked back at that time, she would recall very clearly a sense of anticipation. A firework mutely blossoming, Concorde ripping noiselessly across the sky: those vacuum-packed, suspended seconds before the bang.
Three
Five fifteen on a Tuesday evening in late November: the crowded southbound Bakerloo line. Tamsin Jarvis, now seventeen, still very skinny, had a seat. Even better, she had the end seat. This meant she could lean right away from the woman on her left and press her hot cheek onto the pane of glass dividing the seats from the standing section. She had shrugged off her parka at Marylebone to reveal a faded black Nirvana T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘flower sniffin kitty pettin baby kissin corporate rock whore’. In her lap, a book of Beethoven piano sonatas, open at No. 21. Tamsin had been tracing the melody with a chewed-down fingernail, pleasantly conscious of the incongruity: a grungy-looking teenage girl absorbed in classical music, performing the indisputable miracle of turning black marks on the page into sounds in her head.
She didn’t notice the suitcase until the train was pulling out of Piccadilly Circus. It was a pine-green, hard-shelled case with wheels and an extendable handle, pushed up against the other side of the glass panel. How long had it been there? At Charing Cross, she looked to see if somebody claimed it. People jostled past it on their way out, irritated by the obstacle. A small woman with a scrappy high ponytail banged her knee on it and let out a bleat of pain. The woman scowled around for the owner, but no one came forward.
Almost as soon as the train had left the station, it stopped. Tamsin looked at the suitcase. Then through the window behind her at the tunnel blackness with its dirty arcana of wires and pipes. Then back at the suitcase. Someone was watching her: a tall boy about her own age, with broad shoulders and something slightly Asian, Chinese or Japanese maybe, about the eyes. He was standing in the middle of the carriage, holding the handrail with both hands, elbows flexed as if about to do a chin-up.
The boy nodded towards the suitcase.
‘Is that yours?’
Tamsin shook her head. ‘Is it yours?’ she asked, stupidly.
‘No.’ The boy leaned forward and tapped the shoulder of an older man in a pale grey trench coat. ‘Excuse me, sir: does that case belong to you?’ His voice was respectful and refined, the accent upper class without a hint of arrogance.
The man frowned, shook a no, turned back to his paper.
Tamsin and the boy each read the same thoughts in the other’s face. When the train jolted, they both jumped. But it was just a false start; another jerk and they were moving again. Tamsin looked away, suddenly sheepish. No one else seemed concerned about the case; surely they were both being paranoid.
But her gaze was drawn back. Tamsin’s mind played forward to the blast, the train carriage crumpled like a Coke can. Though of course, she wouldn’t see that. She was sitting next to the suitcase; she would be killed outright. Tamsin Jarvis, daughter of the conductor Bertrand Jarvis, was killed outright in the attacks of 25 November. Unless the pane of glass was thick enough to protect her, just to begin with. Maybe it would shatter, or melt down onto her, sticking her clothes to her skin…
At Embankment, the same thing again: one lot of passengers shuffling off, the next lot starting to push their way on prematurely. And all the time the suitcase squatting there, unclaimed. At the last minute, Tamsin stood up and burrowed to the exit. Two seconds later the tall boy followed her out. Neither of them said anything.
In the bustle of the platform, Tamsin felt their fears start to shrink into silliness. The boy headed decisively for the help-point phone, only to find it was broken. As they discussed what to do, their convictions gave way to embarrassment. At last Tamsin said, quite firmly, that she thought they had both overreacted.
The boy laughed nervously. ‘Right. Bloody hell. Don’t know about you, but I could really do with a drink.’
‘I was meant to be meeting friends in Camberwell…’ She looked up at him. There was a charming, improbable smattering of freckles across the bridge of his very straight nose. ‘But yes, a drink would be lovely, yes.’
He held out his hand, smiling for the first time. ‘I’m Chris.’
On the escalator, Tamsin felt the elation she associated with playing truant, but there was something else, too: an intimacy thrown over them first by fear and now, increasingly, foolishness. Yet at the entrance to the station, they both paused and breathed in deeply, tasting concrete in the damp November air. The world was newly sweet.
Chris took her to Gordon’s Wine Bar on Villiers Street. ‘A real gem of a place,’ he said loudly, as they made their way down the little stone staircase. The bar had low-vaulted ceilings and red candles stuck into old wine bottles, each with a dusty ruff of stalactites. The clientele was mostly male and middle-aged; but there were also some groups of younger drinkers playing for sophistication, and a fair-haired couple with matching hiking boots and a Rough Guide. Tamsin was nervous about her fake ID – thus far, she’d done most of her underage drinking in Camden pubs – so Chris, already eighteen, went up to buy the drinks. As she waited, she gazed round at the framed newspaper clippings, the cobwebs (evidently encouraged), the line-up of bottles behind the bar.
Tamsin was indulging in an old, childish game of deciding which instrument each wine bottle would be – some were square-shouldered like violins, others sloped gently from the neck like double basses – when the fear she’d felt in the tube rose up again. What if, at this very moment, people were dying because she and Chris had been too – too what? too selfish? too shy? – to act?
‘How will we know what’s happened?’ she asked Chris, as he placed a little carafe of red and two glasses on the table in front of her.
Chris shrugged. He started to pour out their wine, still standing, not meeting her eyes.
‘It was definitely nothing.’ He sat down opposite her, tucking his long legs under the table with difficulty. Tamsin waited for him to settle, then lifted her wine glass and tipped her head to one side.
‘Cheers.’
The clink of their glasses registered as a punctuation mark. Somehow, it had been agreed that neither of them would mention the suitcase again.
Their conversation was unremarkable: where they lived, what A-levels, how many siblings. Hearing in each other’s voices the same expensive educations, he confessed, a little shyly, to Rugby (‘but on a bursary, you know’), she to St Paul’s. They ascertained that, aged fourteen, they had both been to the same teenage charity ball, where a friend of Tamsin’s had kissed a record twenty-five boys in the space of two hours. Perhaps Chris had been one of them? Tamsin described her friend: tallish, dyed blonde hair, heavy eyeliner? Chris didn’t think so; the girl he had kissed that night – the first girl he had ever kissed – was a brunette with traintracks. And so to kisses, first kisses, bad kisses, aborted kisses, swapping horror stories with that world-weariness peculiar to late adolescence, dismissive and vaunting at the same time. Tamsin referenced a one-night stand, ever-so-casually, and watched Chris’s eyes widen briefly, telling against his knowing nod.
‘Right.’ Tamsin emptied the last of the carafe into Chris’s glass. ‘My turn,’ she said, bending for her handbag. ‘Wait a moment … here it is … no, fuck. Fuck, I was sure I had twenty quid.’
Chris was already on his feet. ‘It’s fine, really, I’ve got plenty – I’ll get it. Please, allow me,’ he added as Tamsin made to protest. ‘It would be my pleasure.’
These last words seemed an absurd imitation of someone older. Tamsin started to laugh; but when she saw the discomfort in Chris’s face, she softened the laugh to a giggle that was inescapably flirtatious – becoming, without quite meaning to, a girl being bought a drink by a boy who wanted to buy it for her.
He came back with a bottle this time. ‘Friend of mine, he did a gap year working in Bordeaux, just picking grapes to start with, bloody hard work … anyway, we’re meant to be tasting, what was it, blackberries, and some sort of spice, oh, it was clove, and something else a bit weird – leather, I think…’
Tamsin watched Chris’s mouth while he talked. She was trying to work out whether she fancied him. He was undoubtedly good looking and, to her, a little exotic – his Japanese father, his Hong Kong childhood. But in spite of Chris’s charm and the off-beat romance of this impromptu date, she wasn’t entirely sure she liked him. There was something in him that couldn’t function without outside approval. He wasn’t a show-off, exactly, but he needed an audience.
(Later, she would forget this. In the edited version, only the romance would remain.)
Chris’s hand hovered near the book of Beethoven Sonatas, now lying on the table underneath Tamsin’s bag. ‘Uh, may I?’
He opened it gently. ‘All these notes … I tried once, but I was no good. Think I just about made Grade 5.’ He shook his head in admiration. ‘I’d love to hear you play. Seriously, I think musicians must be the closest thing to angels.’
For a moment Tamsin thought it was a bad pick-up line; but one look at Chris’s face told her he was in earnest. She decided that she didn’t fancy him.
‘Are you going to be a professional?’
Tamsin nodded, then remembered to add a modest grimace. ‘If I make it. It’s pretty tough.’
Chris was impressed. ‘What about the rest of your family? Are they musical, too?’
‘My – yes, my mum’s a singer, actually. And my sister plays the oboe.’ Tamsin found herself reluctant to say who her father was.
Chris’s thoughts were rather more straightforward. He did fancy Tamsin, and he wanted to kiss her. She was tough and edgy and – a word that had powerful mystique for Chris – artistic. He was entranced. The more they talked, the more certain he felt that they had been brought together by fate and irresistible mutual attraction. Everything about the evening seemed tinged with inevitability.
They had had nothing to eat. By 9 p.m. when they stood up to leave, they were both fairly drunk. On the stairs, Chris dared a hand in the small of her back. Not wanting to embarrass him, Tamsin let it stay there; though she had a dim premonition that this would mean more serious embarrassment for both of them later.
But later never came. As soon as they reached ground level, Tamsin’s phone began to buzz.
‘Shit, loads of missed calls. Sorry—’
Tamsin wedged the phone between ear and hunched right shoulder, leaving her hands free to fumble with the zip on her parka. Chris could hear the low chirrup of the dial tone.
‘Mummy? Mummy, is that you?’
Her face went tight as she listened. ‘Okay. I’m coming home.’
Tamsin pocketed her phone and started on the zip for a second time. ‘I have to go.’ Her voice was hard and strangely adult, different from any other tone he’d heard her use that evening.
‘Is everything all right?’ Something warned him not to touch her again.
‘I can’t explain. Sorry. I have to go.’ It was a pedestrian-only road but she checked for cars out of habit, three quick pecks of the head. Chris called after her but she was already gone, over the street and into the bright tiled mouth of the tube station.
He didn’t have her phone number. He didn’t even know her surname.
And so for Chris – who never had the chance to discover that Tamsin didn’t want to be kissed – the evening retained all the allure of unrealised possibility. Time magnified her charms in his memory. Tamsin informed his type; he looked for her height in other women, her slightness, those small, widely spaced breasts that had barely nudged the fabric of her T-shirt. To say he thought about her constantly would be an exaggeration, but she was, in a sense, always there – as an ideal, a measure against which everyone else was found wanting.
* * *
On the phone, her mother had been unintelligible. Tamsin assumed she had somehow uncovered the affair, but in fact, her father had simply announced that he was leaving and that he had been planning to leave for years. The trigger? Serena’s sixth-form scholarship to the Purcell School: Bertrand had wanted to wait until both his daughters had a secure future ahead of them before disrupting their home environment. Now that Serena’s musical career was more or less assured, he felt free to leave.
This was what he was explaining to his wife, for the fourth time that evening, as Tamsin came through the front door.
‘My god. My fucking god.’ Roz’s voice was muted with disbelief. ‘You actually think you’ve been considerate, don’t you, you shit—’
In the hall, Tamsin hung up her coat; she felt as if she were preparing for an interview. The house smelled like it always did: wood polish, old suppers, stargazer lilies, home.
When she stepped into the sitting room, both her parents turned to look at her. Her mother was dressed, incongruously, in a ritzy black cocktail number with a swishy little fringe of bugle beads around the hem. Her usual five-inch heels had been kicked off; standing in her bare feet on the thick carpet, Roz looked very small indeed. The corn on her middle right toe shone in the lamplight.
‘Your father’s leaving us. He can’t wait to get away, apparently. He’s been sick of us for years, apparently.’
Bertrand took a step towards his wife, one hand raised. ‘Roz, that’s not fair, that’s not what I said—’
‘But luckily for you, he’s deigned to stick around till now. So as not to disrupt your home environment. Now, isn’t that nice of him, Tamsin? Aren’t you going to say thank you to your father?’
‘Roz, this is between you and me. I won’t have you using Tam like this—’
‘He says there’s no one else, but I almost wish there was. I almost wish there was.’ Roz fought down a knot of hysteria. ‘I think I could understand that better than this, this dismissal—’
‘Valerie Fischer.’ Tamsin kept her voice as clear and steady as she could. Even in her anger, she was aware of the need to enjoy this longed-for consummation. ‘It’s Valerie Fischer, isn’t it, Dad?’
Father and daughter held one another’s gaze like lovers for three, four, five seconds before they remembered Roz.
She was motionless, a visionary staring through them to a strange new past.
* * *
From then on, everything was different. Roz was unable even to choose between red and green pesto without consulting her daughter. There was no longer any question of Tamsin leaving home; Roz needed her too much. She attended the Royal College of Music as planned, but stayed in her old childhood bedroom at home in Holland Park. After years of friction, mother and daughter were now inseparable. Tamsin acted as spokesperson, supplying all the fury and indignation and disgust that Roz herself couldn’t seem to muster.
‘Tamsin’s my sellotape,’ Roz would tell her friends. ‘She’s the only thing holding me together.’ She gave her mirthless laugh.
Tamsin’s friends were wary of her, unnerved by the thought of her long silence. She was newly inscrutable. She even looked different: gone were the Nirvana T-shirts and the belly-button rings. At first, her new role – as her mother’s counsellor, comforter, guard dog – felt like dressing up. Then she became it, and it grew harder and harder to remember a time when she and Roz hadn’t been bound to each other in this way. The scar above her belly button faded, from aubergine through lavender to a little raised sickle-shape the colour of clotted cream.
It was around this time that Roz retired from singing, after twenty-four years as a soprano soloist. When she and Bertrand first met, Roz had been a rising star in the opera world, already well known for her unexpectedly powerful vibrato. Her size was her USP: it seemed extraordinary that such a small person could make such a big noise with apparently so little effort. It also helped that she was beautiful. ‘Aha. Roz Andersen, the siren with the siren,’ Bertrand had quipped when they were introduced. Two weeks before their wedding, The Sunday Times ran a picture of Roz on the cover of the colour supplement, playing Desdemona in a big-budget ROH production of Verdi’s Otello. Then Bertrand’s career really took off, and together they became moderately famous. They were the golden-haired golden couple of music, rarely absent from Tatler.
Cigarettes had always been an occasional pleasure for Roz, a guilty secret kept carefully hidden from the agency that insured her voice. After the break-up, though, she took up smoking in earnest. A pack a day, then two packs. Everyone was worried. Roz lost count of the times she was warned about ruining her voice. Her response was unvarying: ‘I know. I don’t care.’ She took grim solace in this deliberate self-sabotage, which seemed to her to correspond with the magnitude of Bertrand’s crime.
(In fact, Roz’s voice was going anyway. Killing it off with a nicotine addiction induced by the trauma of separation was marginally preferable to watching her reputation fall into a slow, age-related decline.)
It was Tamsin, with her own unlimited supply of anger, who finally persuaded her mother to convert grief into rage. After three months of crying and smoking, Roz put on her sequinned Louboutins and climbed up onto the roof of Bertrand’s precious Merc, with a steely Tamsin and two fearful, admiring neighbours (both women) looking on. The next day, she distributed his wine cellar amongst her friends.
During the divorce process the Daily Mail got in touch, hoping for photographs. Together, Roz and Tamsin sifted through two decades’ worth of holiday snaps to find the perfect pose: Bertrand on the beach, off-duty, paunch relaxed, clutching a can of Boddingtons. The amphitheatre of his gut. In a second photograph he and his moobs reclined on a deckchair. A third showed him sad-arsed under a beach shower, muffin-tops slopping over the waistband of his designer trunks. The Mail ran all three. The headline was ‘Conductor in the Odium’.
When Roz moved out, Tamsin moved with her. Bertrand offered to pay the rent on a separate flat, closer to the Royal College; but this, like all his attempts at rapprochement, was met by the cool, almost professional hatred that had come to define Tamsin’s relations with him.
There were no boyfriends during the Royal College years. On her one, brief visit to Roz’s therapist, in the immediate aftermath of the divorce, Tamsin had been diagnosed with ‘trust issues’. ‘That’s unoriginal,’ Tamsin had told the shrink, feeling herself equally unoriginal even as she said it: the privileged rich kid from a broken home, wisecracking back to her jaded psych. Since then, several of her friends had suggested the same thing – that her father’s behaviour made it hard for her to have any faith in men. Tamsin had another explanation: the Royal College boys simply weren’t to her taste. They were too precious, too aware of their own talent. She slept with a couple of them, but more out of a sense of obligation to a hedonistic student lifestyle than any real desire. Mostly, though, she was at home with Roz, or working at her piano.
Occasionally she still thought about the boy on the train. The faint aversion was gone. She remembered only that he had been good looking, and that there had been wine, and candlelight, and an exhilarating sense of adventure. Most of all she remembered herself, with the disconcerting feeling she was remembering someone else.
Then she graduated from the College, fell in love with a history teacher several years her senior, and forgot about Chris completely.
* * *
When Tamsin was nineteen, her shoulders lost their angles; her arms and legs filled out; her nose and jaw took on a solidity that was unmistakably Bertrand’s. Her hair darkened to his exact shade of dirty gold, and even her newly swollen breasts appeared to belong more to her father’s side of the family than her mother’s.
Alarmed by the weight gain, Tamsin went to see her GP. She certainly wasn’t fat, but she was a lot bigger than she had been six months ago. Was it the Pill? Dr Lott didn’t think so. She scrolled briskly back up through her notes, rows of Listerine-green data on a convex black screen giving their laconic account of Tamsin’s life. Menstruation had started late, hadn’t it? This was probably just the tail-end of a mildly delayed puberty. ‘It happens sometimes. Nothing to be worried about. You’re a healthier weight for your height now, actually. It’s really not a problem.’
But it was. The mirror gave her back her father’s face, leonine, handsome, hated.
Four
The history teacher was called Callum Dempster. He and Tamsin met in the canteen of St Timothy’s, the East London comprehensive where Callum was deputy head of humanities. Newly graduated from the Royal College, Tamsin was playing keyboard in an Arts Council-funded workshop designed to introduce children from disadvantaged backgrounds to classical music. Callum was embarrassed that he’d never heard of her famous father; she was delighted.
After five years at Cambridge, one year in Berlin and nearly a decade in London, Callum’s Glaswegian accent was as strong as it had been when he left home. He hadn’t consciously held on to it, but he’d never tried to lose it, either: in his experience, it had always been a social advantage. At Cambridge, many of his privately educated peers felt reassured by his background. If someone like Callum could make it from a high rise on the banks of the Clyde to rooms in King’s, then the system wasn’t entirely unfair. He also added colour. Making assumptions based chiefly on Trainspotting, people would talk to him about drugs – only to learn that he didn’t even smoke. But a paracriminal prestige had clung to him anyway. Callum was tough, Callum was authentic, Callum was somehow more real than anyone who came from Wiltshire or Surrey or Hampstead.
Tamsin was a member of the Socialist Workers Party – something Callum teased her about so mercilessly that, six months into their relationship, she stopped going to the meetings. But she still read the email newsletters, and Callum still represented, for her, a vague yet unequivocally positive concept she called ‘the Real World’.
So she was disappointed when he landed his dream job: teaching Classics at a prep school near Chalfont St Peter, about an hour’s fast cycle ride outside London.
‘I don’t understand why you don’t want to make a difference. Those children at your school, what’s going to happen to them if people like you give up on them?’ She was washing up, something she only did when she was angry.
Callum explained, patiently, that he wasn’t making a difference at St Timothy’s, he was just marking time. ‘And anyhow, Tam, even if I could make a difference, it would never be big enough to justify how shite the job is. I’m not interested in crowd control. I’m interested in teaching. I’m not being defeatist here, I’m being realistic. And honest. I want to enjoy my life.’
The job at the prep school, Denham Hall, provided him with small classes of well-behaved children and a salary that meant he could finally put down a deposit on a flat. In the long holidays, he had time to start writing a book he’d been thinking about since his Masters: a study of the culture of combat in Roman society, and its impact on modern conceptions of warfare.
Once again, his accent came in handy. It was as classless at Denham Hall as it had been at St Timothy’s. In both schools, it won him unworked-for respect.
* * *
Callum’s Cambridge friends had long since abandoned their Braudel and taken jobs as bankers, lawyers, management consultants. All of them were home-owners; and, with a few exceptions (Will Heatherington, devoted playboy; Colin Warner, probably gay; Leo Goulding, fledging neurosurgeon and workaholic), all of them were married.
And then Leo got engaged, to a pretty, plump anaesthetist called Bex. They celebrated with drinks at their new house in Herne Hill. Tamsin went to the party with Callum, a little reluctantly. She was eight years younger than him and she found his clever, older friends intimidating.
She also resented the ridiculous fancy dress that Callum’s friends found so amusing. It seemed absurd that all these intelligent people, now mostly in their thirties, should want to make themselves foolish in this way. Tonight’s theme was A&E: many guests had simply come in lab coats or pilfered scrubs, but there were also plenty of full-blown head wounds, pregnancies, crutches and stethoscopes. The room was decorated with crepe bandages and surgical masks. Even the playpen set up in the corner for the few couples who already had babies had been draped with a Red Cross flag. Tamsin had let Callum stick a plaster on her cheek, but that was as far as she was prepared to go.
‘No no no that’s precisely the problem. The privileging of a university degree over all other forms of higher education,’ said a short girl wearing a tight white tank top covered in fake blood. Tamsin had met her several times before but she couldn’t remember her name. ‘If that doesn’t encourage elitism, then…’
Leo, their host, shook his head impatiently. ‘I just don’t think we can begin to understand what the world might look like to someone without certain basic advantages. And I’m not just talking financially.’
Tamsin had been stuck in this conversation for over twenty minutes and she was bored. Neither the girl, whom she didn’t like, nor Leo, whom she did, had thought to ask her opinion at any point. She went to drink her wine but her glass was empty. Callum was nowhere to be seen.
‘Tamsin Jarvis! Looking as ravishing as ever!’
Will Heatherington inserted himself between the girl and Tamsin and deposited a loud kiss on each of Tamsin’s cheeks. He was one of Callum’s closest friends; for three years at Cambridge, they had been on the university water polo team together.
For once, Tamsin was pleased to see Will. She actually knew him independently of Callum: his family had lived near hers in Holland Park, and Tamsin had encountered Will at intervals throughout her childhood, mostly at their parents’ parties. She remembered him as a boisterous teenager, teasing her unkindly about her skinny legs. Now thirty-two, Will was good-looking in the most obvious way: tall, with naturally olive skin, glossy dark blond hair, Bambi eyes and strong cheekbones. He could have been a mid-nineties boy-band pin-up. Only the full mouth was out of register. There was a hint of the predator about his pout, a complacency that was somehow aggressively expectant.
‘Tamsin, you’re dry, we can’t have that.’ Will produced a bottle of champagne and started to fill her glass. These days he was scrupulously polite to Tamsin; but there was always something in his tone that gave her the impression he was secretly laughing at her. ‘Hope you don’t mind, Leo, I invited some reinforcements for later. Including two hot lesbians,’ he went on, turning to the girl in the blood-stained tank top.
‘I’m not gay any more,’ she said.
Will grinned and ruffled her carefully styled hair, which was already sparked with grey at the sides. ‘I’ll believe that when I see it, darling.’
‘Reinforcements, yes, that’s fine,’ said Leo, detaching himself from the little group. ‘Sorry – got to go rescue Bex – she’s been cornered by those orthopods she was too nice not to invite—’
‘Sooooo,’ said Will, resting one forearm on Tamsin’s shoulder and the other on the un-lesbian lesbian’s, as if they were all jolly chums. ‘Isn’t this nice? Leo and Bex, the beating of two tender hearts as one, the unimpeded marriage of true minds, etcetera, etcetera?’
‘Mmmm,’ said Tamsin, who never quite knew how to respond to Will’s florid speaking style.
‘Talking of true love,’ he went on, ‘has my secretary managed to keep her paws off your boyfriend?’
‘Leah’s not your secretary,’ Tamsin replied evenly. She was remembering why she disliked Will so much.
‘Leah?’ asked the un-lesbian, suddenly interested. ‘As in Jonno-and-Baz-in-one-weekend Leah?’
‘The same.’ Will bowed his head.
‘Has she been trying it on with Callum?’ the girl asked Tamsin. She looked amused.
‘No, she’s just his flatmate.’
‘What, like they live together?’
‘Mm-hmm.’
The girl raised one dark eyebrow. ‘And how do you feel about that?’
Leah was a PR officer at Will’s law firm, referred to by Will either as his secretary or ‘our resident serial shagger’. But despite the girl’s reputation, Tamsin didn’t feel threatened. In fact, Tamsin never felt threatened by anyone where Callum was concerned: he adored her, and she knew it. Now, though, under the pressure of scrutiny, Tamsin found herself incapable of communicating this conviction. She took an overlarge gulp of champagne and blinked to clear the tears that the fizz brought to her eyes.
‘Leah’s cool, we don’t see that much of her, but she seems cool,’ she heard herself say, lamely. The un-lesbian stared at her for a moment, then turned back to Will.
‘I heard she fucked Charlie Huffman.’
Tamsin held out her empty glass for more champagne. She was, if possible, having even less fun than she’d anticipated.
Callum, on the other hand, had been having a wonderful evening. He was not generally prone to sentiment, but tonight, fondly, tipsily, surely, he felt everyone he loved in the world was here, in this room. There was little Jake Simonson, excitedly telling everyone about his first architectural commission. There were Victor and Caitlin, a serious, hard-working pair of actuaries, deeply bronzed and full of stories from the year-long trip to India that everyone thought they’d never make; Zander Pownall, messing about in the playpen with his two-year-old son, no trace of the long depression he’d suffered in his mid-twenties; Antoine Namani, another neurosurgeon, making everyone laugh with his medically inflected rap (‘I’m malignant, you’re benign, when I lay down a rhyme, I metastasise straight into yo’ spine’). And, of course, Tamsin, his Tamsin, beautiful tonight in a long wrap skirt tied high at the waist, her sulkiness visible only to him – which in itself felt like something precious. It was, thought Callum fuzzily, a roomful of happy endings.
Fetching a fresh beer from the drinks table, Callum noticed a tall man he’d never met before, dressed in a vamped-up nurse’s outfit: tiny white skirt, choppy blonde wig, lumpily stuffed fake breasts. Under a grainy layer of foundation, the ghosts of several large freckles were visible. It was easily the most outrageous costume of the evening. When Callum complimented him on it, the man thanked him by lifting up the skirt to display a pair of women’s knickers, his penis squashed obscenely behind the sheer fabric.
‘Practically standard issue these days,’ the nurse-man said cheerfully. ‘No self-respecting officer seen dead at a party without see-through panties.’
‘You’re in the army?’ Callum was immediately interested.
‘Yes, sir. Just finished at Sandhurst,’ said the man with irrepressible pride. He tugged off the wig, revealing a full head of closely-cropped black hair, which he proceeded to scratch with the innocent abandon of a dog shaking itself after a swim.
‘And how did you find Sandhurst?’
‘Still recovering from the final exercise. It was a total CF.’
‘Is that the ten-day one? Diamond Victory?’
‘Dynamic Victory. It’s a beast.’ The boy looked impressed. ‘How do you know that?’
Callum smiled, pleased with the compliment. ‘I’m writing a book, a sort of military history thing … Sorry – what’s a “CF”?’
‘CF, charlie foxtrot – means “cluster fuck”, basically a major beasting. Also a verb, as in, I got cluster-fucked. Which you do, at Sandhurst. That’s the whole point.’
The two men laughed and clinked beer bottles properly this time, acknowledging their approval of one another.
‘Is it true that you lot are using “muggle” for “civilian” now?’
They were fifteen minutes into a discussion on military slang when Callum noticed Tamsin watching them from across the room with an uninterpretable expression on her face. Callum waved her over, eager to show off his new find.
‘Here, Tam, come on, I want you to meet—’
‘Chris.’ Tamsin said the name at the same time as Callum. ‘It is Chris, isn’t it?’
‘Have we…?’ The boy was embarrassed. Then his soft mouth pulled tight in an enormous grin. ‘My god – it’s Tamsin!’
‘Do you know each other?’ Callum asked, unnecessarily.
‘I can’t believe you recognised me under all this shit!’ Chris was still grinning broadly. ‘How do you guys—’
‘Callum’s my boyfriend.’ As if to illustrate this, Tamsin kissed Callum on the cheek. There was a longish pause. ‘So … what are you up to these days, Chris?’
‘Well, actually, I’m in the army—’ Chris began, but he was interrupted by a violent thump on his shoulder. Leo’s brother Edwin, a small, smooth-faced man with thick dark eyebrows, had come to claim his friend.
‘Sorry to interrupt, but we’ve been waiting for this bastard to come and do shots with us for over half an hour.’
‘Great to meet you.’ Chris shook Callum’s hand vigorously. ‘And – and to see you too, Tamsin,’ he added, looking slightly confused.
‘Right fucker, your first one’s a triple,’ said Edwin, as he marched Chris over to their friends.
‘Where do you know him from?’ Callum asked Tamsin.
She looked vague. ‘Ages ago. I don’t know him at all, really.’ Tamsin’s unusually large eyelids gave her face a sleepy, sensual expression. When she had been drinking it sometimes seemed to Callum as if it cost her a physical effort to keep her eyes from closing altogether.
‘Callum, you dirty great faggot, where have you been all my life?’ It was Will again, pulling Callum into a back-slapping hug. Tamsin made a face at Callum over Will’s shoulder, but allowed herself to be led off to meet Will’s ‘reinforcements’, who were busy re-stocking the drinks table with stronger stuff. The playpen was being packed away.
* * *
Tamsin woke from a dream about Bolognese sauce to the smell of Bolognese sauce. Then she remembered it was Sunday, and the smell modulated to bacon. She squinted at the other side of the bed. Callum was already up. Hoping to defer her hangover for another five minutes, she pulled the duvet over her head and settled back down into the pillow.
The flush of the toilet woke her again. Tamsin came out from under the duvet and the smell adjusted itself for a third and final time. The door to the little en suite bathroom was ajar.
‘Callum. God. You could at least shut the door,’ she croaked.
Callum emerged from the bathroom with an apologetic grin. He opened the window, filling the room with the fumes of the Edgware Road and the sickly strawberry scent from the shisha bar on the ground floor.
‘Shit, I feel rough.’ Tamsin pressed three fingers to each temple and glared up at Callum. ‘Why aren’t you in more pain?’
Callum sat down on the bed. ‘Because I wasn’t half as full of it as you were, you nugget.’ He leaned in for a kiss, but Tamsin clamped her lips shut.
‘Mm-mmm.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t taste good. And I’m not kissing you while this room still stinks. En suite. Jesus. Maybe the least romantic proposition ever.’
‘All right, all right,’ he laughed, running a hand over his khaki-coloured hair, which immediately sprang back to attention. ‘I’ll get us some coffee.’
Callum came back with coffee, toast and yesterday’s newspapers, the cutlery jittering on the tray as he bent to settle it in Tamsin’s lap. He perched on the windowsill with his own mug, watching Tamsin through steam lit white by the morning sun. Her loose cotton vest sagged in the middle and he could see the two parallel lines marking the start of her breasts. In the beginning, Tamsin had been embarrassed by her breasts, which were full and heavy and sat low on her chest. It had taken Callum a long time to get her to sleep without her bra on, and even longer to persuade her to stand up naked in front of him. Her left breast was noticeably larger than her right, something she hated and he adored.
‘You perving?’ asked Tamsin, without looking up from her paper.
‘Who, me? Never.’
There was a longish silence. Then Callum said, ‘Chris seems like a nice guy.’ The words had a slightly processed, unnatural timbre. This was because Callum had been preparing to say them ever since Tamsin woke up.
‘Mmm?’ Tamsin glanced up distractedly. ‘Oh yeah. Yeah, he does.’
‘How did you say you knew him?’
‘I didn’t say, did I?’ Now Tamsin put the paper down, frowning slightly. ‘I don’t remember if I said. I don’t think I did.’ She paused. ‘It was my first year at College. He was going out with a friend of mine for a bit. So I saw him a couple of times, through her. Then they broke up and I didn’t see him again. Until last night.’
Tamsin was surprised by both the lie and the facility with which she’d invented it.
‘Which friend?’ Callum wanted to know.
‘Girl called Kitty,’ Tamsin said. ‘Don’t think you ever met her.’
‘You didn’t know him biblically?’
‘What?’
‘Did you – sorry.’ Callum winced at his own question.
‘Christ, Callum!’ Tamsin shook her head in exasperation. ‘No. No I did not sleep with him.’
‘Okay. Sorry. Tam, I’m sorry. I just wondered. I don’t know why.’ Smiling sheepishly, Callum padded over to the bed and got in beside Tamsin.
‘Am I allowed to kiss you yet?’ he asked.
Tamsin put two fingers to his lips. ‘Only if you promise to stop being an idiot,’ she said, looking stern. ‘And be gentle, okay? My head hurts.’
Callum made a little growling noise and pretended to bite her fingers. Then he kissed her, very softly, on the upper lip. The blue-and-green-checked duvet had slipped halfway down the bed. Callum tugged it up over their shoulders and drew Tamsin towards him for a hug, tucking her head under his chin. Her hair smelled of Herbal Essences shampoo and Marlboro Lights.
‘I love you,’ Tamsin said to Callum’s collarbone. ‘I love you and I really should get up. I’m so behind with my practice it’s not even funny.’ She yawned and stretched, then drew in for another kiss. ‘Right. That’s it. I’m up.’
Callum lay with his hands behind his head and watched her dress. Halfway through the process – pale yellow cotton bra and faded jeans, no T-shirt – she went into the bathroom to clean her teeth and came back with a thick white blob of moisturiser above each corner of her upper lip. This was a preventative measure, talisman against the two deep lines flanking her father’s mouth. He watched her twisting the dome of her deodorant into her armpits. As she waited for it to dry, she held her arms away from her sides in a slightly simian pose. Callum knew all of this by heart and he loved it.
* * *
On the way from Callum’s flat to the bus stop, Tamsin stopped between the Halal Fish’n’Chip shop and the Discount Drug Co. She wanted to undo it all, to go back and tell Callum the truth about Chris. She had never lied to him about anything like this before, and she wasn’t entirely sure why she had now.
But then, she thought, she had never told anyone about what happened – or rather, what didn’t happen – on the tube that day. At first, the enormity of her parents’ break-up had simply displaced everything around it. Later, when she remembered the incident, she felt no compulsion to turn it into an anecdote. As a little girl, one of Tamsin’s greatest pleasures was to eat an apple and throw away the core, in the knowledge that she was the first and last human being ever to set eyes on the sleek mahogany pips at its centre. A similar impulse had governed her silence on the subject of Chris and the suitcase. The story formed a secret fold in the fabric of her life, and it seemed that to talk about it would be to spoil it, somehow.
Tamsin had been staring unseeingly into the window of the Discount Drug Co. – which, inexplicably, sold nothing even remotely pharmaceutical, just fake Gucci handbags and Louis Vuitton luggage sets. The salesman saw her looking and came to the door. ‘You want real leather, I give you good price.’
Tamsin shook her head and moved away. She couldn’t confess to Callum now. The fact that she’d lied in the first place would only create grounds for suspicion when really, she knew, there were none.
On the bus, the Edgware Road moved past jerkily, in instalments. Starbucks, M&S, Tesco Metro, traffic lights. Four newsagents all offering money transfer and mobile phone unlocking. More traffic lights. The man sitting in front of her got off at Paddington. Tamsin watched him down the street, thinking that his short, tight Afro had looked like a black version of one of those green kitchen scourers. She wondered whether it felt anything like a scourer, then wondered if that was a terrible thing to wonder. She realised that she’d never touched a black person’s hair and the thought suddenly seemed very shameful to her.
This was the sort of thing that bothered Tamsin. It also bothered her that she was twenty-five and still living with her mother in Notting Hill. Notting Hill itself bothered her. Taking the bus, she saw the Burberry hijabs and oil-black puffa jackets steadily giving way to faded denim and Havaiana flip flops. And then, when she got off, the walk down from the relative buzz of Pembridge Road into the hush of the side streets with their milk-white villas and dense green gardens. In central London, quiet like this has a direct correlation with money.
Quietest of all was Ashcombe Mews, where Tamsin lived with Roz, and, some of the time, her younger sister Serena (Beanie). Tamsin unlocked the door of Number 8 and stepped from the sunny street into the dark hallway. When her mother bought the house five years ago with the money from the divorce settlement, she had immediately painted all of the ground-floor rooms a rich midnight blue. She also coloured her long, naturally white-blonde hair black with a home-dye kit from Boots. Colour therapy, she had snapped at anyone who dared to wonder why. Then the dye grew out, leaving a ragged chevron of blonde and grey down the middle of her head. Smoking in dark glasses, Roz had looked like Ozzy Osbourne.
All this was before she discovered her new vocation. It was her friend Meredith Sykes (fifty-four, twice divorced, CEO of a successful lingerie chain) who first came up with the idea of the lectures. Initially, Roz was unconvinced. Her experience of heartbreak seemed too private to be of interest to anyone else. ‘But these are powerful universal tropes you’ve tapped into,’ Meredith had urged. ‘What you did to Bertrand – people dream about that sort of stuff all the time, but you actually went ahead and did it. Of course people will want to hear about it.’
She was right. Within a year, Roz was giving several talks a month on the healing properties of revenge. The audiences were small and exclusive: she advertised solely through word of mouth, and charged a considerable amount for her time. Roz found she liked the work. It went some way to filling the gap that singing had left in her life. She was still performing, after all, and she was still very good at it: her audiences loved her for the way she tempered the rhetoric of empowerment with just the right amount of self-irony. Grateful clients would send her photographs and even videos of their own acts of retribution, which Roz incorporated into her PowerPoint slideshow. She was especially popular with divorce parties.
Pulsuz fraqment bitdi.
